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My Last Few Winter Movies of 2022
Dec. 29th, 2022 11:37 amA Christmas Winter Song - A fairly standard Lifetime Christmas movie that’s an excuse for Ashanti to sing a lot, which we watched specifically because my cousin plays the husband. (It’s not a romance; Ashanti’s character gets over the death of her father and rediscovers her love of Christmas by helping a homeless man.) The first half-hour drowns you in exposition, but there are a couple of cute moments and clever bits later. You don’t need to go out of your way for it if you don’t have a family member in the cast.
Enola Holmes 2 - Brown is entertaining and the supporting cast is clearly having a good time; the plot is a little dodgy and relies on the evil genius basically doing everything for funsies. And it’s a bit longer than it probably needs to be. But I was entertained. I look forward to more movies in this style as Sherlock Holmes comes fully into the public domain.
Black Adam - So, on one hand, Johnson’s charisma is unmatched, Brosnan does an excellent Dr. Fate, and the supporting cast is in general quite good. There are some totally fun action sequences. They managed to make a strongly anti-colonialist, anti-US-in-the-middle-east story and quietly fly it under everyone’s radar. But the movie…isn’t great. It’s way too long. Atom Smasher and Cyclone are only there so the “Justice Society” is more than two guys. Several plot points (such as Black Adam being hurt by Eternium) are explicitly established but then nothing is done with them. The attempts to link it to the larger DCU via Amanda Waller are clunky, especially because they deliberately don’t link it to the Shazam movies it directly connects to via the character backstories. I don’t regret seeing it, but it’s not going to get rewatched.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Oh, this was a delight. Maybe not quite as good as the first one (it’s still ultimately a sequel, at the end of the day), but just as intricate and clever and it’s littered with nods and cameos. I give them a lot of credit for Blanc being the only connection between the two movies and not the real driver of the events—in both movies, he’s there as an observer and to sum up the plot for the audience, but he doesn’t do the dirty work. The “outside detective” story is a genre for a reason; and it works. And boy, Musk’s Twitter meltdown couldn’t have been better-timed for this, eh?
Enola Holmes 2 - Brown is entertaining and the supporting cast is clearly having a good time; the plot is a little dodgy and relies on the evil genius basically doing everything for funsies. And it’s a bit longer than it probably needs to be. But I was entertained. I look forward to more movies in this style as Sherlock Holmes comes fully into the public domain.
Black Adam - So, on one hand, Johnson’s charisma is unmatched, Brosnan does an excellent Dr. Fate, and the supporting cast is in general quite good. There are some totally fun action sequences. They managed to make a strongly anti-colonialist, anti-US-in-the-middle-east story and quietly fly it under everyone’s radar. But the movie…isn’t great. It’s way too long. Atom Smasher and Cyclone are only there so the “Justice Society” is more than two guys. Several plot points (such as Black Adam being hurt by Eternium) are explicitly established but then nothing is done with them. The attempts to link it to the larger DCU via Amanda Waller are clunky, especially because they deliberately don’t link it to the Shazam movies it directly connects to via the character backstories. I don’t regret seeing it, but it’s not going to get rewatched.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Oh, this was a delight. Maybe not quite as good as the first one (it’s still ultimately a sequel, at the end of the day), but just as intricate and clever and it’s littered with nods and cameos. I give them a lot of credit for Blanc being the only connection between the two movies and not the real driver of the events—in both movies, he’s there as an observer and to sum up the plot for the audience, but he doesn’t do the dirty work. The “outside detective” story is a genre for a reason; and it works. And boy, Musk’s Twitter meltdown couldn’t have been better-timed for this, eh?
